Valorant, the competitive multiplayer tactical shooter from League of Legends developer Riot Games, launched into closed beta on Tuesday to select Twitch streamers and offered free keys to viewers watching those broadcasts.
The PC game quickly rose into the most-watched game on Twitch reaching over 1.7 million viewers. Valorant continues to hold the top spot at the time of this writing with a little over 900,000 viewers.
Riot Games wrote a blog post on Wednesday to explain how the studio is giving away closed beta keys going forward without overloading its servers.
Potential players will still need to have their Twitch and Riot accounts connected alongside watching “roughly” two hours of streams with drops enabled to be eligible for a key.
Riot Games said it is continually taking all eligible users and giving a “percentage” of them closed beta access. The developer said the selection is random but gives a higher “weight” to those who watched more hours, though said that users do not need multiple streams open, have the streams idle, or to be on Twitch at the very moment to be eligible for access.
The studio also said it is looking into account sellers and warns that buying a Valorant account could result in a ban before the game’s official launch.
The closed beta is scheduled to run until the game’s launch sometime in Summer 2020 and will be free-to-play.
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